The concept of a 'front lawn', or even of easy access to nature in general, has not always been as popular as it is today. As Jackson notes, a front lawn is rather useless except as a status symbol (unlike a back lawn, people rarely use the front lawn for barbecues, etc.), and they can cut the amount of available space in a neighborhood by 50% or more, making them a truly luxury expense.
But this popularity wasn't always so widespread - and n fact, it isn't even so commonplace in some parts of the world today (though the Westernization of global cultures has changed this somewhat).
For those who are interested, the most expensive zip codes in New York are 10014 (by real estate) and 10128 (by income). The poorest would probably be 10451 (South Bronx).
Contrast those both to 10025 and 10027, the border of Harlem (poor, but rapidly gentrifying, historically black) and the Upper West Side (historically well-off for several decades, also a large Jewish community).
> The concept of a 'front lawn', or even of easy access to nature in general, has not always been as popular as it is today.
The divide between city and country living is ancient. I find most of your assertions based on Jackson hard to swallow. We were almost exclusively agrarian before industrialization. Your article gives the fraction of people living in cities as 1/3 in 1890 in the US. It's more than that today. It seems like lawns and easy access to nature have been around for a long time. If they are more in demand today, maybe it's because there is a natural need that's going unfilled.
(If anyone has a good chart of US city vs. non-city dwelling over time, please share.)
> As Jackson notes, a front lawn is rather useless except as a status symbol
A status symbol? Only if you are looking at it from the perspective of an apartment dweller. Suburban neighborhoods don't think of people in terms of their front yard. They don't think of front yards much at all, except when it comes time to cut them.
If your front yard is messy, that might reflect badly on you, but that sort of information will be conveyed in other ways. The front yard won't have much to do with it.
I suppose a more accurate way to phrase your argument would be "ornamentation". Even then, a front yard is not useless. People like to have space between them and their neighbors. It is a buffer between you and the road, and a place for your children to play. People like to have a space that's theirs.
I think it is much more likely that the size of yards is a function of what people find comfortable to have between them and their neighbors, with other factors like cost coming into play second.
Why, for instance, do New Yorkers buy their second homes in the surrounding rural areas? Why not another apartment?
When I lived in the city I felt cramped. Apartment living taxed my well-being. It's possible this is because of how I grew up. I think it's more likely it's a physical attribute of how I am. Suburbanites are probably the same way.
Open up Google Earth and pan over America. Are you suggesting all the front yards you see are equivalent to gold chains, and not some fundamental property of how people want to live?
> and they can cut the amount of available space in a neighborhood by 50% or more, making them a truly luxury expense.
Again, this could only come from a city perspective. Front yards are easy to get. Everyone who wants one has one. The objective function of a suburban area is not to maximize space efficiency.
By the end of your comment you steer the discussion back towards cities in particular---but Jackson is an argument on actual suburbanization, not "intra-city" suburbanization. So if you aren't talking about these concepts in general, why predicate your comment on Jackson's book/phenomenon?
> We were almost exclusively agrarian before industrialization.
Who's the 'we'? Western Germanic society perhaps, but even there there is no shortage of examples of large urban populations, including for the very rich, who usually preferred the safety of the cities.
> Suburban neighborhoods don't think of people in terms of their front yard. They don't think of front yards much at all, except when it comes time to cut them.
> People like to have space between them and their neighbors. It is a buffer between you and the road, and a place for your children to play. People like to have a space that's theirs.
> The objective function of a suburban area is not to maximize space efficiency.
Potlatch would probably have been a better term, but your points are exactly what I was saying - maintaining a well-manicured lawn is incredibly expensive, particularly in areas where grass doesn't naturally grow well (like desert areas).
> Again, this could only come from a city perspective. Front yards are easy to get. Everyone who wants one has one.
Before you dismiss my point as 'only a city perspective', think about the total expense associated with lawn care - assuming that you don't let it completely go to seed, because this is the potlatch that I was talking about.
Read Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use' and you'll see what I mean - she doesn't describe the lawn itself in too much detail (it's an artifact of the time in which it takes place), but even from the first paragraph it's clear she's not talking about a lawn filled with grass. In fact, she's referring to a "lawn" of dry dirt, which she makes 'wavy' by raking wave patterns into it. There's no function to raking dry dirt any more than there's a function for cutting down healthy grass to 1-2 inches from 5-6 inches.
It's not like there's anything natural about a well-manicured lawn; in most suburban enclaves, it's rare to see more than one row of flowers and other flora - 10% of the space at the very most. If the 'function' of a lawn is to provide privacy, or a buffer, it would be just as well served by an empty lot. Or even better, by tall bushes and trees, which can look just as aesthetically pleasing. Don't confuse incredibly artificial front lawns with 'nature'.
> Why, for instance, do New Yorkers buy their second homes in the surrounding rural areas? Why not another apartment?
Second homes and front lawns have nothing to do with each other. You seem to dichotodmize 'suburban homes with lawns' and 'multi-family apartments', but there's actually quite a lot in between. It's just rare within this country because societal forces have caused us to tend to prefer the poles of that spectrum, for the time being.
> Are you suggesting all the front yards you see are equivalent to gold chains, and not some fundamental property of how people want to live?
At one point in Puritan society, housewives were judged by the number of lumps in their sugar bowl, because that showed how much time the household invested in house care. Today we use other metrics, lawn care being one. There's no fundamental property of how people want to live, except that all societies create largely-arbitrary metrics of judgement (like potlatch) - this just happens to be one of ours today. Don't think that any of these arrangements of living are permanent and universal, as if they spring from some intrinsic understanding of human beings. Look at old Chinese living arrangements and you'll see what I mean, even if you only compare them to Chinese homes today.
> Jackson is an argument on actual suburbanization, not "intra-city" suburbanization. So if you aren't talking about these concepts in general, why predicate your comment on Jackson's book/phenomenon?
Since 1970, only two cities in the country have grown in population without annexing territory from surrounding areas. If you read Jackson's works, you'll see that these two aren't as clear-cut and fundamentally different as you seem to think.
That thought demonstrates that you don't understand him.
> Western Germanic society perhaps, but even there there is no shortage of examples of large urban populations
What definition of "no shortage" are we using?
Yes, London and Berlin existed, but what fraction of the population lived in these areas? How many were there?
When >50% of the population is directly involved in producing food (blacksmiths aren't direct), what fraction do you think can live in urban areas?
> maintaining a well-manicured lawn is incredibly expensive,
No, it isn't. I know poor people with fantastic lawns.
As to the rest, you're revealing your Puritanism. You're upset that people aren't doing the things that would make you value them. That's a problem, and it isn't theirs.
Where do you get off "suggesting" that they please you instead of folks who they want to please, includiing themselves (a possibility that you don't even consider).
> Second homes and front lawns have nothing to do with each other.
I'll bite - which of them do you have? (For some folks, they do have a lot to do with one another. For others, not so much.)
Which reminds me, your inaccurate usage of potlatch is incredibly insulting on at least a couple of levels. Of course, you know that, and don't care.
This is only relevant for suburban (or village) style settlements.
For example, most of ex-USSR cities are built in huge 5-, 9- or 15-floor apartment blocks with lots of trees around them.
In this case, trees tell you nothing: there might be few trees because the part of the city is newly-built; there are no trees in historic inner city but it's usually the best and most expensive place. If there's a plenty of trees, it still tells you nothing.
Even in Western Europe there was a period in the 1950s and 60s when city planners constructed high-rise satellite towns with lots of trees between the apartment blocks, pretty much all of which are mainly populated by poor people to this day.
#trees per person probably is a better metric. Band-filtered population density, as that filters out high frequencies due to local peaks and low frequencies that denote average wealth of a larger neighborhood, may be an even better one. I guess that might even work for extremely high-rise building as in Dubai. Firstly, the lower floors in such buildings typically are offices, and secondly, I guess the really high buildings will stand less close to other high buildings than the lower skyscrapers that surround it.
Maybe ratio of green to gray would be a better metric. Too much green or grey not good? Still, seems pretty tenuous until a country is beyond a certain level of development.
It's a very old, very small and well-preserved city, the poorer people tend to live in the villages (which are also very green, as it's rural and well-watered thanks to the mountains). Further, it doesn't have a large industrial economy.
I'm inclined to believe this article is the result of confirmation bias.
I'm currently looking for housing in charlotte, and tree cover tells me nothing about whether I want to live in a particular neighborhood. Like Ljubljana, trees are everywhere.
Interesting question. The answer might actually vary from country to country. In countries such as the U.S., where mortgages are the norm for all but the richest people, where you live is fairly strongly tied to current income, which dictates how large a mortgage you can qualify for. In other countries, if housing is primarily financed out of accumulated wealth rather than loans tied to current income, it might be more strongly determined by wealth.
It looks like a zoom of an image from the project "Earth's City Lights":
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167 .
In this project, they don't show a real image, but a reconstruction of multiple images to remove the clouds and other problems.
The images that are linked at the bottom of that page (for example http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/55000/5516... ) are incredible interesting. For example you can see your own country and find the big cities and the gaps where there are almost no cities.
It is similar, at least. Here is another one showing South Korea that is taken using a regular camera from the ISS that shows similar light patterns (https://plus.google.com/117789022459699674254/posts). It's hard to see North Korea because of the angle and the clouds.
It's also a part of city planning, take for example Canberra Australia (the capital city), except for the more recent sections of the city (which seems to be suburban sprawls) almost the entire city is tree covered.
Certain areas with high rise and high density don't have room for trees.
Not if they free-range their livestock. I used to live in Botswana, right on the border with South Africa, and the border was easy to spot. The South African side, with its managed farms, was always much greener than the Botswana side, where cattle and goats wander around at will.
In Europe at least, a good way to tell is to look at which material the roofs are covered with. Noticed that while flying from over Switzerland to over Silesia. The percentage of red clay rooftop tiles (which also stand out among green trees) decreases as you move east, until everything starts looking very drab and gray.
New Hampshire has the 6th highest rate of millionaires per capita, and 9th highest income per person overall. We often top CQ's "Most livable states" list (which looks at schools, job growth etc.) We also have the highest percentage of tree cover in the nation. http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/08/06/new.hampshire.le...
The huge amount of tree cover in New Hampshire historically speaking is also a pretty recent event. 100+ years ago NH was mostly farmland with little to no tree cover.
Yeah it's a little complicated historically. We used to have a nice "old growth" forest, with big oak trees etc. Nothing like the amount of cover we have now, but a lot. Then the British took basically all of the nice oaks for ships, and farming and so on cleared a lot of the rest. ~100 years ago people started feeling nostalgic about all the trees (plus farming in the area plummeted when soldiers from the Civil War returned with stories of real topsoil! and land you didn't have to remove rocks from every spring!) and a reforestation effort started. Unfortunately there is also an infestation of bugs that eat the tips off of trees so now we're stuck with tons of crappy pines with a few oaks and maples finally showing up.
Weird I was just discussing this while walking through Piedmont. I wondered if it was a viscous / virtuous cycle thing. The areas with nice trees attracted those with wealth who protected them with disposable income while those with fewer trees cost less to live in, attracted lower income residents who couldn't afford to protect them.
North Korea is one of the most unequal countries on the planet, so that's not a very good example. In fact they aren't even officially committed to equality, never mind how it works in practice. They dropped any leftist rhetoric in the 1990s, and now are a country based on the "Juche Idea" (a kind of idiosyncratic religion) combined with the "Military First" economic principle (that resources should be unequally divided, with the majority going to people connected with the military).
Yeah, I'm not really sure of the political message of the comparison. It's not surprising that wealthier people live in nicer areas with more greenspace....
Income inequality is not the enemy - in fact it is what incentivizes our economy and ultimately builds wealth for everyone. Corruption, lack of opportunity, abject poverty - those are the problems.
He may have thought so because the phrase "income inequality" is usually used in the context of describing it negatively (in the US at least). I guarantee you that the phrase "income inequality" is used by Democrats in the Senate/House 10x as much as Republicans. No Republican is ever going to say their tax cuts for the wealthy "increase income inequality", they'll say it "helps the job creators create jobs".
Edits: Wow, I need to learn to make sure I reread sentences in full when I go back and reword something.
That makes sense. Because the same qualities that lead to higher incomes are required to care about things around you.
For example, building skills and wealth take a long term view and the ability to make sacrifices, deferring enjoyment now for the possibility of future enjoyment.
And a tree takes short term sacrifice of time for something that will have take years to materialize.
The concept of a 'front lawn', or even of easy access to nature in general, has not always been as popular as it is today. As Jackson notes, a front lawn is rather useless except as a status symbol (unlike a back lawn, people rarely use the front lawn for barbecues, etc.), and they can cut the amount of available space in a neighborhood by 50% or more, making them a truly luxury expense.
But this popularity wasn't always so widespread - and n fact, it isn't even so commonplace in some parts of the world today (though the Westernization of global cultures has changed this somewhat).
For those who are interested, the most expensive zip codes in New York are 10014 (by real estate) and 10128 (by income). The poorest would probably be 10451 (South Bronx).
Contrast those both to 10025 and 10027, the border of Harlem (poor, but rapidly gentrifying, historically black) and the Upper West Side (historically well-off for several decades, also a large Jewish community).